Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 43

Writers Need Other Writers

Writers need other writers. It is such a solitary occupation, this sitting in front of a computer—or a typewriter or a pad of paper—and building stories out of the deepest recesses of our minds, that we need from time to time to be with others who share our compulsion for wandering off into worlds of our own creation. The conversation that occurs when we come together gives us a chance to breathe, to say, “Ah, yes. It’s all right, this odd thing I’m doing. Someone else does it too!”

I’m back h...

An Imitation of Life?

I once had a friend who made a point of not telling me about the more dramatic events in her life because she was convinced that if she did she would find herself one day in one of my stories. The fact that she had never found herself—or anyone else she knew in my stories never assuaged her fears.

If she had only known, stories are not—as is often assumed—an imitation of life. They are far more an imitation of other stories.

Life, even an ordinary, mundane life, is almost infinitely complex in...

The Secret

I love revising. Revising is so much more fun than facing the terror of the blank page/computer screen.

And that’s the most important piece of advice I have for writers coming along after me. Learn to see revision as the best part of writing. Learn even to love revising.

The key is never to think of revising as fixing something that went wrong the first time around. Think of it as going back to something you love to play with it, to make it even better.

It is nearly impossible for a manuscript,...

Dipping Even Farther into Nostalgia–the Typewriter!

I was born wanting to write. Or at least I was born with my head full of stories. (My elementary school teachers used to write on my report card in the category then called deportment, “Marion dreams.” It was not a compliment.) I didn’t begin actually putting words on the page, though, until I was released from the drudgery of pencil on paper by learning to type.

What magic! It was like someone who struggles to walk acquiring wings!

The first typewriter I ever owned was a 1956 manual portable S...

Computers I Have Known

I’ve been thinking lately about computers I have worked with. I don’t usually have much of a relationship with machines. The cars I drive are only practical necessities, something to move me farther and faster than my feet can manage on their own. I have strong opinions about stoves, hate the electric ones, love the instant-on/instant-off of a gas flame. And I find a stick blender indispensible, the kind I can plop into a pot of soup to turn it instantly smooth and creamy. (Can you tell I’m f...

What about the Other Characters?

Most readers, I suspect, assume that a story’s perceiving character will come from the writer’s own psyche, at least to some degree. Not that authors must commit murder to write from the perspective of a murderer, but to do so we must be able to get in touch with the part of ourselves that might, given the right circumstances, be capable of such an act.

What about the side characters, though, the ones the writer doesn’t climb inside of? If characters are only observed, not inhabited on the pag...

Bringing Characters to Life

I’ve been talking about fictional character as illusion, created out of my own psyche or borrowed from the world around me.

I find it a fascinating concept to sort, even after nearly forty years of writing fiction. The question of how characters are brought to seeming life is never fully answered, partly because the process changes from writer to writer and story to story and partly because it remains somewhat mysterious, even for the one writing the fiction.

Let me extend the discussion into t...

Marion Dane Bauer celebrates the publication of Little Dog, Lost

Win a set of 35 bookmarks (2″ x 6″ in size), one for each child in your classroom. “Like” Marion’s Facebook page, sign up to follow Marion’s blog (in the column to the right)—lots of good information about writing you can use with your students—or sign up for e-mail announcements on Marion’s home page between May 1st and May 21st and we’ll send you a pack of bookmarks for your classroom or book club (we’ll do this for up to 140 classrooms). Ten very lucky winners, chosen at random, will recei...

The Illusion of “Real” Characters

Ruby, a much-loved service dog

Ruby had the most incredible ears I’ve ever seen. They jutted out on each side of her narrow face like airplane wings. They seldom drooped, and they never rose higher. They just hung out there horizontally as though she were about to take flight.

And that’s where Buddy, whose name ultimately becomes Ruby in Little Dog, Lost, began.

The real Ruby was a service dog for my friend Martha. (I’m using past tense, because Ruby died about the time I completed the manuscrip...

Borrowing characters from real life

Ruby, a much-loved service dog

When my daughter was ten or eleven, she used to say from time to time, “Mom, write a book about me. You could call it Heavens to Elisabeth.”

“Beth-Alison,” I’d say, “I can’t write a book about you. I don’t know you well enough.”

“Oh, Mom,” she’d say, in utter disgust, and that was the end of the discussion.

But the truth is I didn’t know her well enough to use her as the perceiving character in one of my stories—and still don’t—though I know her about as well as mos...